The exemplary embodiment relates to product location mapping and finds particular application in connection with a system and method for determining the spatial layout of product content in a product facility, such as a store or other retail environment.
Retail chains, such as pharmacy, grocery, home improvement, and others, may have a set of product facilities, such as stores, in which products are presented on product display units, such as shelves, cases, and the like. Product information is generally displayed close to the product, on preprinted product labels. The product labels indicate the price of the item and generally include a unique identifier for the product, e.g., in the form of a barcode, which is often used by the store for restocking and other purposes. Periodically, stores place some of the items on sale, or otherwise adjust prices. This entails printing of sale item labels and/or associated signage and manual replacement of the product labels and/or addition of associated signage. The printing and posting of such sale item signage within each store often occurs at weekly intervals.
It would be advantageous to each store if the signage was printed and packed in the order in which a store employee encounters the sale products while walking down each aisle. However, retail chains generally cannot control or predict the product locations across each of their stores. This may be due to a number of factors, such as store manager discretion, local product merchandising campaigns, different store layouts, and so forth. Thus, individual stores may resort to manually pre-sorting the signage into the specific order appropriate for that store, which can be time consuming and not always accurate.
Current approaches for documenting product locations on shelves include sending one or more persons through the store taking pictures along the store aisles with a mobile device, such as a cell phone camera. Post-processing of the captured images is then used in an attempt to identify each product and its location on a shelf. This approach suffers because of significant variations, including product packaging changes, product orientation on the shelf, motion blur, lighting variations, and the like.
It would be advantageous to a chain of stores to be able to collect product location data substantially automatically across its stores. Each store could then receive signage which has been automatically packaged in an appropriate order to avoid a pre-sorting step.